Does anyone monitor IBM BLADECENTER?

Question

I need to monitor our IBM BLADECENTER (I'm not sure the Series model yet) but first I'm curious if anyone is successfully monitoring it with Orion.

It appears to me to be locked down (proprietary) with using IBM DIRECTOR to monitor it, but I sure hope not...

We have a mix of Windows and Linux on these blades.

lchance · Answer

That makes sense.

I'm so spoiled using Dell MIBs with our Dell hardware, I expect the same from IBM, but it won't happen.

Thanks for the help.

kb1lxm · Answer

The IBM Director can get those items especially since I can see alerts for low disk space in the IBM Director Console (It has the default thresholds that we don't use.)

We monitor the blades individually with Solarwinds, using SNMP to get the CPU/Memory/Network Interface/and Disk Space.  We really only use IBM Director for Hardware monitoring and management (ie. Firmware Updates) on IBM Devices.

Does your IT Department have policies against using SNMP on servers (Linux should be able to do SNMPv3 if it's not an ancient version, MS you're stuck with SNMP2vC unless you want to use a third party addon, and those always work well :-p).  I mean you have Solarwinds, you can atleast use it to manage things at the OS Level (and some Hardware stuff with custom pollers).

For monitoring the Chassis, I think over all health (and you'd be doing this through the MM/AMM anyway, the blades will still run even without this) you could create pollers for Power Supply Presence, Voltages, and if there are any nasty messages in the event logs.  You should be able to monitor the switches as seperate devices on their management IPs (which you configure in the MM/AMM).

lchance · Answer

First, we want to start monitoring CPU and hard disks. I have no idea what will be next.

Does the IBM Director Agent get these two items?